Louise Witcher saw the potential in the house, despite the 60 feral cats living in it, the holes in the floor and the boarded windows.
She had one goal in mind: to make a safe, homey place for foster children.
Witcher is volunteer coordinator for The CALL (Children of Arkansas Loved for a Lifetime) in Conway and Faulkner counties.
After “nine hard months of work,” The CALL support center opened at 745 Factory St.
in Conway on The Ministry Center campus, the former Second Baptist Church. The house redo rivals an HGTV makeover. The soothing grays, bright teal blue and coral reflect The CALL’s new logo. The furniture is modern and clean, and Witcher gave much of it a new life with a coat or two of paint. The playroom has new and gently used toys, books and games.
“I wanted an environment so incredibly relaxing that children were not intimidated during their visits here,” she said. She estimated that 30 foster children a week use the center.
Witcher said the home, which opened in late April, is the second support center in the state; the first is in Benton in Saline County.
Adoptive and foster families can use the home for whatever they need, including birthday parties, and foster children can visit there with their biological parents in a “nonthreatening” atmosphere, Witcher said.
“We try to reunite these families, and if you have more visits, you increase the chances,” Witcher said.
The Arkansas Department of Human Services has “free rein” of the support center.
Witcher is a founding member of The CALL board, which was formed in 2009, for Conway and Faulkner counties. The CALL started in 2007 in Pulaski County. It is a faith-based, nonprofit organization that recruits foster families through churches.
Witcher said The CALL in Conway and Faulkner counties trains 95 percent of the foster families in those counties, which have 230 children in the foster-care system. Since The CALL started, the number of children waiting to be adopted has dropped from 600-plus to 287, Witcher said.
She didn’t plan to get so involved.
“I’ve been doing CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) for 14 years, and that’s how I got involved in The CALL,” she said.
As a Court Appointed Special Advocate, Witcher worked with children in the court system to provide support and advocate for their best interests. She wasn’t allowed to foster children, but she saw the homes in which some of her clients were placed.
“We saw there were not enough homes and not of the quality we wanted them to be,” she said.
People kept bringing Witcher information about The CALL and encouraged her to to get involved.
“I said, ‘I don’t have time for that.’ It was a God-calling. I had just started working at CASA,” she said. God kept “pushing and pushing” her to get involved with The CALL, she said.
Witcher said she had a situation in her life that she didn’t think would end well.
“[I told God], ‘If you take care of this, I’ll do what you ask me,”’ she said. “[The situation] ended in a way I’d never dreamed. It had a good ending.”
Witcher, 64, said she can relate to some of the upheaval foster children have to go through. She grew up in Fayetteville, and her parents divorced in the 1950s. She and her younger sister lived with their grandmother, Esther Lawson, until their father remarried.
Witcher said her grandmother made all the difference in her life.
“She was my guardian angel,” Witcher said. “She’s the one who took us to church.”
Witcher didn’t meet her biological mother until years later. The woman remarried and had five more children. Witcher said she has tried to reconnect with her mother, but her mother hasn’t shown any interest in doing so.
Witcher moved to Conway to attend the University of Central Arkansas, where she majored in health education and sociology. She met her husband, Dwight, there, and they married in 1974.
She owned two tanning salons, taught weight-control classes at one time, and she volunteered at her children’s school, serving on the Parent-Teacher Organization, working to get new playground equipment and on other projects.
Her husband started his own company, Environmental
Process Systems. He constructs and installs wastewater and water-treatment systems throughout Arkansas.
The couple performed 90 percent of the work to rehabilitate The CALL home, a former Second Baptist Church parsonage. It was also used by a private school at one time and was being used for storage — and a cat hangout — when The CALL got the house. Craig Connor of Conway, a CALL board member, had the idea to renovate the home, she said.
Someone donated odd pieces of flooring, some of which cover one wall in her office; donated sheet metal is on a different wall in the house, as are wooden pallets and barn wood. Witcher’s son-in-law threw away the desk she uses, but she salvaged it.
“When you only have a certain amount of money to work with, you make it go,” she said. “It’s like the fishes and loaves.”
The CALL’s biggest fundraiser is the Beauty in Brokenness Gala, and the second annual event was held in April. Churches and individuals donate to The CALL.
The CALL Mall in the back of the house is one of the more well-used features of the center. Clothing rods, running almost the length of the room of two interior walls, hold gently used and new clothing for babies and toddlers. Diapers, blankets, books and toys are available for foster or adoptive families to take at no cost. Furniture is available, too.
“It’s been such a blessing,” she said of The CALL Mall. “The goal is to serve our families.”
It’s working, Witcher said, and even children considered “unadoptable” are being successfully adopted by families.
Brandy Fowler of Conway, chairwoman of the board for The CALL for Conway and Faulkner counties, is also The CALL Mall coordinator.
Fowler and her husband have 10 children — two foster, seven adopted and one biological child.
She said Witcher is “amazing, amazing. She is everyone’s go-to, for sure — for all of our foster parents and even our Department of Children and Family Services staff, parents who are involved with The CALL, parents who want to be involved — she’s the go-to person.
“That resource center — she has basically done everything, physical labor. She would be up there covered in paint head to toe, or with blood running down her leg where she was scratched or fell, and I’d say, ‘Woman, go home,’” Fowler said, laughing.
“[The center] is definitely all because of her,” and her husband, Fowler said. “Mr. Dwight is just as amazing as her.”
An engraved piece of metal leans on a shelf in Witcher’s office. A gift from the board of directors, it dedicated The CALL support center to Louise and Dwight Witcher, “for the countless hours they put into making the home a reality.”
Witcher said the support center serves a huge need for the families and DHS.
DHS didn’t have the facilities to bathe the children when they were taken from a home, and that was a major need, she said.
Witcher showed the bathroom in the remodeled home. The shelves were stocked with toothbrushes and hairbrushes, lice kits, shampoo and everything a child might need.
“Oh, it looks like they used a lice kit — good,” she said.
The kitchen is stocked with snacks; the freezer has meals donated by churches. A washer and dryer are available to wash children’s clothes, or maybe their special blankets.
Witcher said children often have to wait in the DHS office until a family can be found.
“Last year on the Fourth of July, we had two children who actually sat at the department for two days until they found a home for the children to go to,” she said. “That meant the caseworker had to stay away from her children.”
Foster children aren’t allowed to live at the resource center, but they can stay there for several hours while DHS representatives work to find a foster family.
If it’s 2 a.m. when the children are removed from the home, DHS officials have a code to enter The CALL support center, Witcher said.
“We want to assist DHS so they’re not so frazzled,” she said.
A few days ago, a caseworker called about a child who was in DHS care for the third time.
“She was so famished, and she had bug bites all over her,” Witcher said of the girl.
The child was brought to the center and bathed and fed while the DHS worker found a foster family.
“She has a good place to take care of her; [the foster mother] will love and fight for her,” Witcher said.
“These families love children and want to make a difference,” she said. “Our CALL homes are miracles; they really are. People walk into this as a ministry, not as a job. You don’t have to be rich to foster a child; you just have to have a safe place for the child.”
That’s what she created with The CALL support center.
“My whole goal in life is to make a difference that lives past me,” Witcher said.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.